Makaya McCraven at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Makaya McCraven
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland, OH
February 18, 2026

As the Cleveland Museum of Art continues to expand its artistic reach under the leadership of Gabe Pollack, director of performing arts since 2022, the dividends are increasingly apparent. With the resources to present artists beyond the scope of a typical club or restaurant venue, the museum has transformed the recently refurbished Gartner Auditorium into one of Northeast Ohio's most compelling listening rooms. Recent seasons have welcomed genre-defying figures such as Nate Smith and Vijay Iyer, and that ambitious trajectory continued on an unseasonably warm February evening with drummer Makaya McCraven—a performance that offered welcome heat amid a grinding Ohio winter.

Born in Paris to a Hungarian singer and an African American drummer, McCraven embodies a broad and borderless musical inheritance. Coming of age during hip-hop's ascendance, he absorbed its production aesthetics and rhythmic elasticity, fusing them with jazz's improvisational core. From the outset, he framed the evening as an act of collective discovery. "We are diving into the unknown without a script," he told the audience, later reflecting, with equal parts humor and candor, "Improvisation is the natural state of being as we try to figure this shit out in real time." The comment felt less like rhetoric than a mission statement.

Joining McCraven on the opening date of his U.S. tour were two longtime Chicago collaborators: trumpeter Marquis Hill and electric bassist Junius Paul. Each musician expanded his instrumental role with electronics, looping devices, and auxiliary percussion, creating a fluid, shape-shifting sonic environment. The first extended improvisation unfolded over a pocketed bass ostinato, layered with droning textures and subtle Middle Eastern inflections. Unison lines between trumpet and bass tightened the narrative before snapping it shut with dramatic precision. The trio's elastic interplay and egalitarian spirit evoked the combustible freedom of Ornette Coleman's trio recordings at Stockholm's Golden Circle in the mid-1960s—music that balanced abstraction with earthy momentum.

From his breakout album In the Moment came "Three Fifths a Man," its billowing tones and sine-wave textures swelling and receding as McCraven manipulated them in real time from his phone. Against a crisp yet pliable rhythmic framework, Hill delivered a probing solo that slyly quoted Wayne Shorter's "Footprints," his burnished tone recalling the exploratory lyricism of Don Cherry. It was a moment where lineage and modernity converged without friction.

McCraven's wit surfaced in the next excursion, which began as a wash of static—suggesting the scan of an analog radio dial—before locking onto "In a Sentimental Mood," the classic collaboration between John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. Isolating a phrase, McCraven looped it into hypnotic repetition. Hill sagaciously picked up the melody before the drummer pivoted sharply, dropping a taut funk groove accented by clapstack accents on beat three. The piece morphed again, this time into a loop steeped in 1970s soul, providing Hill another runway for a solo distinguished by judicious electronic shading rather than excess.

By the conclusion of the 75-minute set, the trio had constructed and deconstructed entire landscapes in real time, blurring the lines between composition and improvisation, past and present. The audience, visibly invigorated, responded with an insistent ovation that summoned an encore—an exuberant coda to a performance that felt less like a recital and more like a living, breathing act of creation.

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